Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 300

Pussy Riot versus Georgia Prison Rapes - why some things get reported a lot, and others don't

One of my many pieces of great good fortune was the chance to visit the country we rather oddly call Georgia, several times. Actually, in Soviet days its name was ‘Gruziya’ and its own citizens called (and still call) it Sakartvelo. But this doesn’t appeal to the PC fanatics who like to call Bombay ‘Mumbai’ or Peking ‘Beijing’ - on the grounds that ‘that’s what the locals call it’ - which isn’t even true in the case of Bombay.

 

By the way, if you read France’s grandest left-wing newspaper, Le Monde, you’ll find that the Chinese capital is ‘Pekin’. Likewise, Germany’s grand Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, calls it ‘Peking’. The ‘Beijing’ cult is very odd, and needs to be examined more carefully.

I think the PC media choose to call it ‘Georgia’ , in the hope this will influence Americans, who feel a sort of kinship with it because it shares a name with one of the 50 states, but who would be unmoved by the travails of a tiny faraway country called Sakartvelo. We’ll come back to that. It’s a very beautiful place, and its capital, Tbilisi, one of the most fascinating cities in the world, built around a river gorge and – despite terrible destruction in recent years – still handsome and unique. It has its own cuisine, much of it delicious, and makes wines, mostly too sweet for Western tastes, but not all. Try the Mukuzani red if you ever get the chance, a lovely, wistful wine that tastes of rugged valleys and ancient culture. For a good dry white, I recommend Tsinandali , accompanied by Hachapuri, a delicious combination of flatbread and cheese. It is also a rare Christian culture in that part of the world , a form of Orthodoxy, but quite distinct from the Russian or Armenian versions nearby.

 

It lies between the great islamic powers of Sunni Turkey and Shia Persia, and was within reach of the destroying armies of Tamerlane. It is an uncomfortable fact that Russian rule (beginning in the 18th Century) probably saved Georgia’s unique culture, language and alphabet - and rescued its beautiful land from absorption into the Islamic world. There was, as there always is, a hard price to pay for Moscow’s protection, including the absorption of the Georgian church into the Russian, which meant much destruction of art and the imposition of the Russian liturgy.

 

But this utterly fascinating and captivating part of the world ( the Caucasus was once called ‘the mountain of languages’ , as it seemed to be the origin of so many tongues) is also very dangerous. It is incredibly sensitive. In one direction lie the Caspian sea and the great steppes, leading on the China – and nowadays that means Georgia is close to the great Caspian Bubble of oil and gas which is the subject of a fierce diplomatic and political struggle about which the world knows and cares far too little. A vital pipeline from this region crosses Georgia. It is Russia’s southern frontier with Asia, a frontier that until very recently was highly dangerous and much–contested ( and could be again, as the Chechnya wars showed).

 

And it is very close to the explosive parts of the Middle East. Imagine, if you want to see how complex, valuable, dangerous and unstable this region is, how impossible it would be to build a railway line from Moscow to Jerusalem – a journey I for one would love to make before I die.

Those who live in the Caucasus are used to hard choices, though it doesn’t mean they like them any more than we do. When the Russian revolution came, Georgia received special attention from Moscow, because Stalin was of course Georgian by birth – look at that face, not Russian at all. But it was also a place where the hand of the Kremlin always seemed to lie lighter on the land than elsewhere. To fly down from Moscow to Tbilisi was to go somewhere lighter, and more light-hearted, a country of wine rather than of vodka, more than little gangsterish, a little like a sort of Soviet Sicily. There was also a confusing pride in being the birthplace of Stalin. The only remaining statue of the old horror still stood , in those days, in the town of Gori (has it gone yet? I think so).  On the fine classical boulevard in Tbilisi called Rustaveli, there used to be, high on a grand building a carved relief of Stalin’s very recognisable profile. It must have been about 60 feet above the street, and was only visible if you looked for it, or if it was pointed out to you. But everyone in Tbilisi knew it was there. By 1991, when I first visited, someone had managed to throw a paint-bomb at it. It’s gone now, thanks to the furious civil wars which broke out soon afterwards, scarring Tbilisi and beginning a terrible era of instability, refugees and pain.

 

The Communist party and the KGB fought very hard to stamp out Georgian nationalism. In April 1989, Soviet troops attacked nationalist demonstrators with sharpened spades, and also with gas, with indescribably hideous results. Most of the 19 dead victims were young women. So it was hard for the outsider not to sympathise with such figures as Zviad Ghamsakhurdia, the independence leader I interviewed on that first visit – an extraordinary and rather romantic moustachioed figure, whom I remember (perhaps inaccurately) as faintly hysterical, wildly loquacious, and clad in a sort of zoot suit. He died later in mysterious circumstances, and I won’t here attempt to go in detail into the immensely complex struggles which have been taking place in that small (population less than five million) and unhappy country ever since.

 

Turn elsewhere for explanations of Ossetia, Adzharia and Abkhazia (except that Stalin always made sure that there were inconvenient minority populations within the borders of the Soviet ‘republics’. This was so that he could use them to make trouble for those republics if they ever grew restive and independence-minded. And so it has proved) . First there was the unpleasant Shevardnadze era, which more or less destroyed the reputation of the man who had once been Mikhail Gorbachev’s highly respected Foreign Minister. Then came the mob putsch which has since been given the rather sickly-sweet name of ‘the Rose Revolution’.

 

This is a classic case of two wrongs not making a right. I would be amazed if the 2003 elections had not been rigged. You might as well expect the Atlantic not to be wet. But in that particular case, international observers (who often fail to spot the most gross manipulation, or alternatively are completely ignored by the world media when they do) noted that bad things had happened, and were given major publicity for their charges. Kaboom. Supporters of opposition parties burst into the new session of the dubious parliament clutching roses in their hands (who supplied the roses and the idea?), shouted down President Eduard Shevardnadze and chased him from the building.

 

Then it was ‘people power’ all over again ( see ‘Orange Revolution’, etc), big crowds in city squares, slavishly and flatteringly reported by the world’s media, until Shevardnadze resigned. Lo, in new elections, the candidate of the Rose Revolutionaries, Mikheil Saakashvili, won a huge majority. And, would you believe, he promised to fight corruption( who doesn’t) and establish democracy, etc etc.

 

By 2007 things had gone sour, and the police treated anti-government demonstrators quite brutally, and placed limits on freedom of the press (though the Western media were pretty uninterested). Mr Saakashvili also managed to pick a fight with Vladimir Putin, in which the Western media and many Western politicians accepted the simple view of rave Georgia versus vicious, bullying Russia.

 

Now, entirely mysteriously if you rely for the Western media on your information, Mr Saakashvili has lost a parliamentary election (whereupon he received lavish Western media praise for ….accepting the outcome!) . Actually, he has not been popular for some time, and his ratings took a deep dive a few weeks ago when horrible videos emerged of the maltreatment of prisoners in a Tbilisi jail. One rather graphically shows warders raping a prisoner with a broomstick. It’s on the web somewhere. Don’t watch it, or the accompanying film of prisoners whimpering and shouting with pain as warders beat them up.

But mightn’t such matters attract more attention than, or as much attention as, or even slightly less attention than the trial of three silly women for staging a blasphemous protest in a Moscow cathedral? No, not really. Yo'd need to be interested to knwo, and no stars of stage and screen ahve protested as far as I know.

The ‘West’ is not interested in Russia’s oppression because it is oppression, but because it is Russian oppression. Georgia is part of an absurd American attempt to create client states on Russia’s borders, an attempt which will end in tears, as Russia will always be interested in Georgia, whereas America’s interest will fade with time, because it is so far away. It is also paradoxical, as it involves reliable American backing for the appalling hereditary despotism in Azerbiajan,  next door to Georgia.

Georgia is therefore officially one of the good countries, where a mob putsch is reclassified as a romantic revolution and we don’t take much notice of prison rape, police brutality or attempts at censorship. Just thought I’d mention it, in the unending struggle to promote dissident thought.

Whom do the Police Serve? Part Two

My point that I ( and you) pay the wages of police officers seems to have upset some people. One or two have (correctly) pointed out that by buying my newspaper, or reading my books, they contribute to my pay. Well, yes they do, but they don’t have to (though, amusingly, if I accept a fee from the BBC for an appearance, they have contributed to that). Whereas we are required by law to pay the wages of police officers.

 

Would we pay for them, if we weren’t? Would we pay voluntarily for a ‘service’ that often wholly ignored our profound concerns and our desire for peace and safety in our homes (see the case of Fiona Pilkington above all for the most prominent example of this, though my correspondence is full of similar, less dramatic instances)? Would we pay voluntarily for a service that was rude to us, or dismissive of us, or referred to us superciliously as ‘civilians’, which declined to patrol the streets on foot, which closed down most of its local offices and restricted many of those which remained to brief daytime hours; which ceased to enforce any traffic rules except speed limits ( and those through cameras incapable of making wise judgements about whether the offence is important or not), which couldn’t be bothered to investigate or act on ‘minor’ crimes, which just happen to be the ones which cause us most grief, which raced about the place in noisy cars with go-faster stripes, which arrested people for defending themselves, and which put political correctness before crime prevention?

 

Honestly, if someone set up a national business now, offering the ‘services’ provided by the modern British police, I’d be amazed if anyone signed up to pay for it. The police (like some other businesses I can think of) live on a reputation they won in the past, when they were an entirely different body. Most people only discover this when they need the police, and their fond illusions are vaporised by actual experience. I suspect that many of the defenders of the police on this blog are in this position, and while I very much hope their illusions remain unexploded by experience, I beg them to believe me that the above description is accurate.

Of course there are brave and dutiful individuals in the police, as we have reason to note today with the funeral of one of those killed in Manchester, but this does not in any way cancel out the faults of the police force (or 'service' as it now styles itself) as a whole. There are brave individauls even in my much-criticised trade, but their courage does not cancel out the failings of other journalists, or of the faults of the media as a whole. Nor should it prevent discussion of them.  

 

 I shall select three contributions for special attention. I have inserted my responses in their posts, marking my interventions ***

 

 ‘Angus’ says : ‘Somehow or other he (that’s me) knows exactly what happened during the Downing Street incident, enough to make a judgment it seems.’ ***PH :’ I don’t know ‘exactly’ what happened. But I read the newspapers carefully, so for instance I am aware that on 24th September my Daily Mail colleague Peter McKay wrote : ‘According to a colleague who works in Westminster, Mitchell had been in and out of Downing Street three times on the day in question — each time coming and going on his bicycle via the main gate. Only on the fourth occasion was he told to walk his bike through a small pedestrian exit.’

 ‘Angus’ continues: ‘Also, he has tarred all 100,000+ police officers with the same brush he used to tar those who didn't respond to the stone thrown through his window.’

 

***PH. What an odd charge. My complaint wasn’t against any individuals (I never met any. It was their absence that was the point), but was an institutional complaint against a police force that no longer patrolled, that had no local roots, and couldn’t find a simple address. Those roots were destroyed when Roy Jenkins compelled police forces to merge into bigger units, a preliminary to the de facto nationalisation which has happened since.

 

'This isn’t specifically about individuals. In fact it is specifically not about individuals.  It is about an institution in which people voluntarily work. So of course they are obliquely criticised for their acceptance of these things. Those who want to know the detailed and longstanding causes will have to read my book.

'As I’ve said before, since the Police Federation has been prepared to stage huge off-duty marches about pay and pensions, and to barrack Home Secretaries on the same subjects I must assume that the complete absence of any such protests against political correctness, targets, centralisation, Bramshill methods and the other curses of modern policing are a sign of acquiescence to those things.

 

 ‘Angus’ continues Some of the rudest people I have encountered have been nurses but I hope I don't judge all nurses in the light of a few bad experiences.’

***PH ‘So do I. Nonetheless, the existence of rude nurses, like that of offhand and uninterested police officers, should *in itself* warn us that these professions have changed substantially in recent decades . Such things didn’t happen 40 years ago’ .

 

Angus again ‘ I agree that the police have had some very bad press lately and I suspect that many people will have lost confidence in them. I have met some who have been inefficient and complacent but I have also met some who have gone beyond what is expected of them. My personal opinion, and it is no more than that, is that most of them try their best in difficult circumstances. However, they are very poorly led, often implementing policies that they do not agree with.’ PH : ‘Up to a point, see above, though if they don’t like it, they should surely protest through the PF. But many modern officers, who have joined since political correctness and modern methods became supreme, are willing and enthusiastic practitioners of the policing methods that many dislike. They know that this is the key to promotion and retention. ‘

 

 Tony Dodd, in a series of postings, says : ‘What a surprise. Mr Hitchens takes a contrarian view. The rest of the country is wrong.’ *** PH ‘Oh, ha ha, Mr Dodd. But he should know by now that I take my positions on the basis of facts and logic, and follow where they lead. That’s one of the reasons why I took a week to write a column on this matter (though I made some earlier comments on the cycling issue, here and on Radio 2). I don’t care if I’m popular or unpopular. Nor do I take positions for the sake of controversy.

 

 ‘ Mr Dodd ‘The behaviour of the police may or may not have been "officious and needless". Only those who were there can say.’

 ***PH ‘Is that so? Surely an action can be judged as officious by someone who did not witness it, but who has a good understanding of what happened. If Mr Dodd described to me a situation in which he was officiously handled, and the officious person’s spokesmen came to his defence, I would judge between the two accounts from my own experience and reach a conclusion, even if I hadn’t been there. We do this all the time. We can’t be everywhere.

 ‘ Mr Dodd asks ‘ Either way, how does this excuse Mr "I'm the Chief Whip" Mitchell's behaviour? (by "excuse", I mean "taking his side" against the Police.)’ ***PH ‘But it doesn’t. I specifically do not excuse (and specifically condemn) Mr Mitchell’s bad manners. Mr Dodd is quite intelligent enough to know this, and to distinguish between the issue of his manners and the issue of whether he was reasonably entitled to expect the gates to be opened for him. So he is muddying the waters here, presumably because he knows his case is weak. To ‘Excuse’ is blazingly obviously not the same ‘as ‘taking his side against the police’.

 

The word 'excuse' could not possibly mean that, and Mr Dodd knows it. This is brutal torture of the English language, and he should be ashamed of causing such pain and humiliation to an innocent verb. There are two separate issues. Only by separating them can the point be reasonably discussed. ‘Let me sum up. Mr Mitchell was wrong to be rude. The police officer was wrong to refuse him passage through the gates.’

 

Mr Dodd asks :’.How do undoubtedly true anecdotes about other policemen's behaviour, or the attitude of the police in general, have any bearing on the actions of this very senior elected representative?’

***PH ‘For the very reason he discusses above. Our experience of the modern police helps us to judge the truth and significance of the various statements made by the conflicting parties. My experience of Mr Mitchell, that he swears too much, likewise helps me to reach my own conclusion about how *he* behaved.'

 

 Mr Dodd: ‘ Two wrongs make a right?’

*** PH ’I have no idea where I have said that two wrongs make a right. Perhaps he could tell me.’

 

Mr Dodd then asks :’‘Who's defending the police?’

***PH ‘Several people on this thread are doing so, as far as I can see, including him. It is disingenuous of him to pretend that he doesn’t know this, nearly as bad as his torture of the word ‘excuse’, above, and his deliberate confusion of two separate issues. I have seldom seen Mr Dodd argue in such a slippery fashion, and am dismayed at the fall in his standards.

Mr Dodd asks :’ Why is it necessary to "take sides"?’

 **PH: ‘Because (like English trials and parliamentary debates) this is an adversarial contest, seeking to determine both the truth of what happened, and the significance of it. Both sides cannot simultaneously be right about whether Mr Mitchell was entitled to ride through the gates.

 

Mr Dodd : ‘OK, I'll try harder. Mr Mitchell is a rude, overbearing, cosseted and highly remunerated member of a dreadful government. He is a very fortunate human being. Perhaps being inconvenienced by an officious policeman is the worst thing that's ever happened to him. ‘

 PH ***This is just rhetorical blethers of no significance. Who said it was the worst thing that ever happened to him? Not I. Indeed, how did the whole thing become public at all? Not through him, I suspect. Mr Dodd knows perfectly well I don’t defend, or wish to defend, or seek to protect Mr Mitchell as a person or a politician. I dislike his party and his government. I think he has bad manners. Mr Dodd’s only rational purpose, by putting these words in his comment, was to suggest by implication to ignorant persons that I am defending Mr Mitchell and his government against the honest people of Britain. I am not.

 

Mr Dodd:'If so, I'm not sorry for him.’

***PH :’Nor am I. I just think the police were wrong to treat him that way’.

Mr Dodd: ‘ He is in a position to do something official about the gate opening arrangements, if it really means so much to him.’

***PH: ‘Actually, not now he isn’t. He’s been rendered totally powerless in the matter by his public humiliation, and he (and lots of others) will now have to wheel his bike through the side gate , as humbly as possible, for evermore, as all can see. '

Mr Dodd: ‘ The rest of us have to put up with such inconveniences all the time.'

***PH : Maybe so. But I don’t think we should (Does Mr Dodd?), and that’s exactly why I think the police should be critciised for this behaviour.

 

Mr Dodd: ‘ and if we behave as he did, we get arrested.’

***PH : But should the police be able to behave as they did towards him before he swore at them? ’ Is Mr Dodd trying to make an ‘ought’ out of an ‘is’ here? We know that this *does* happen. The question is, *should* it happen? *Should* the police be allowed to behave in this officious, jobsworth fashion? Or should they be restrained?’

Mr Dodd: ’That's why most people are annoyed at his behaviour.’

***PH’ Maybe they are, though a majority doesn't and can't determine truth or right. . But that could be because they have been manipulated into this view, as people so often are by skilful spin. What a pity it would be if the British people were recruited into a campaign to approve and encourage even more official police disdain for law-abiding people.

That’s what’s happening here. Mr Dodd is praising our transformation from a free people living udner the law into squeaking submissive serfs who humbly do what they're told by a uniform. Good heavens, that the Britain I grew up in should become such a servile place.

Well that’s Mr Dodd dealt with. Now we come to someone styling himself or herself ‘Pan’, who says:

 ‘In response to your comments about your article I wondered if you could answer the following question? What evidence is there to suggest the police leaked this to the media. The initial report stated that Mr Mitchell's rant was overheard by other civil servants and members of the public at the gates.’

***PH ‘I’m amazed that ‘Pan’ doubts that the leak came from within the police, and I should have thought that the subsequent involvement of the Police Federation, in an open condemnation of Mr Mitchell ( I believe they publicly called for his sacking), followed by the appearance in the Daily Telegraph of the actual police log of the event, rather pointed in that direction. It’s what you might call strong circumstantial evidence. Meanwhile, I’ve yet to hear of any member of the public who has complained. Why wouldn’t such a person have come forward by now?’

 ‘Pan’ asks :’What evidence is there to suggest Mr Mitchell has been allowed to ride his bike through the four vehicular gates?

***PH : ‘The account given (presumably by a political journalist) to Peter McKay and reported in the Daily Mail (see above). I repeat it here: ‘On 24th September my Daily Mail colleague Peter McKay wrote : “According to a colleague who works in Westminster, Mitchell had been in and out of Downing Street three times on the day in question — each time coming and going on his bicycle via the main gate. Only on the fourth occasion was he told to walk his bike through a small pedestrian exit.” This was prominently published, and repeated later that same week in the Daily Mail by the excellent Martin Samuel. I have seen no denial.

 ‘Pan’ continues :’ Why would anyone want to sit there waiting for these gates to be opened when they could simply push their bike through the pedestrian gate in a fraction of the time? (Or is he being awkward?)’ ***PH: ‘For the same reason that anyone in a car would object to be told to get out and walk through a side gate. Bicycles are road vehicles. They are just as entitled to the use of the road gate as are cars. I might add that nobody can come up with a plausible 'security' reason for all this. as I've said before, if it's safe to have gates opened at all, then they should be opened for all vehicles. If it isn't, then cars should be banned, as well as bicycles,  and Downing Street should be accessible only via a tunnel. ’

 ‘Pan’ ‘Do you honestly believe an police officer should summon a senior officer every time a member of the public protests against a disliked direction/instruction. If so can you imagine the consequences of such a policy?’

***PH. ‘No, nor have I ever said any such thing. I believe police constables should remember that they are the servants of the public, not their masters, and then this kind of thing wouldn’t happen. But if an officer really wants to be wooden and officious, the public should certainly be able to request the involvement of someone more senior.'

 ‘Pan’ ‘As you keep stating that we pay the police's wages, we are their bosses, do they not pay tax also?’

***PH :Yes, but so what? Police officers contribute nothing like as much as the public do (130,000 police officers are a pretty small part of the taxpaying public) , and the public are compelled to contribute those wages for the general good, and not their particular good.

‘Pan’ :’How should we measure police performance? Without some targets surely some officers would become even lazier.

 ***PH: I am told the old station sergeants were pretty good at keeping constables on their toes, in the days when the police did what we aid them for (patrolling on foot, preventing crime and disorder). That will do for me.

‘Pan’ As I purchase the Daily Mail on a daily basis I do hope you can find the truth in relation to these questions, because unless you write for free I do pay your wages!’

***PH; ‘Indeed he does, and I am conscious of it, though I should point out yet again that I do not write for the Daily Mail, but for the Mail on Sunday, a separate newspaper within Associated Newspapers, with its own editor and staff. But if he chooses to stop, then that is that. I can’t make him start again. Whereas, if I don’t like the way the police behave, I still have to pay *their* wages, under the threat of prison if I don’t. So does he. The relationship is quite different. And while I can tell ‘Pan’ what I think, I can’t tell him what to do.

 

My thanks to all the intelligent contributors who have posted their thoughts on the Christopher Hitchens Fan Club. No thanks to those who, quite inaccurately, accused me of whining or complaining. This was not my purpose, nor was it the tenor of my remarks.

Whom do the Police Serve?

And here it comes, the March of the Jobsworths. People who say they are ( and for all I know really are) serving police officers telling me I don’t understand modern policing, that I’m ignorant,  that they’re not servants of the public, that it’s ‘offensive’ of me to write in such a way after the deaths of police officers, etc etc etc.

Well, this all sounds to me like the special pleading of a nationalised industry that has got away without any serious criticism for a long time, and doesn’t like it when it hears it.

Police Officers are  paid by the taxpayer, who has no choice in the matter and to whom they owe a simple moral obligation as a result.  They are not a military formation, but sworn to uphold the law , usually by an oath which binds them to do so without fear or favour. These words mean that every one of Her Majesty’s subjects is equally entitled to call upon a police constable to aid him or her in the enforcement of the law. A sample oath binds the constable thus ‘I will to the best of my power cause the peace to be kept and preserved, and prevent all offences against the persons and properties of her Majesty’s subjects’.

But of course this is exactly what doesn’t happen any more, though it did.  Most of us can whistle if we want the police to keep the peace round where we live, or to prevent offences being committed. Prevention, through a quiet sustained presence on foot,  is a thing they’ve almost entirely abandoned and in many cases despise as a waste of time.

The police now serve the state, and not the people.  This is why they are concentrated in great, scowling clumps around government buildings, but seldom to be seen anywhere else, except whizzing by in cars or clattering overhead in helicopters.

I am, unlike most journalists, filled with insatiable curiosity. Towards the end of the 1980s, I began to be curious about the fact that I seldom saw police officers on foot or bike patrol, as they had been until quite recently.  I was also struck by the fact that large numbers of officers appeared, as if from nowhere, to deal with football crowds or (on one occasion) when protestors tried to save some trees in the centre of my home town, by climbing into them. Where had these officers been all the time? There were so many of them.

Having lived in the same place  -with a few gaps - since 1963, and not being a Londoner, I am perhaps better able to spot changes in this country than people who long ago left their roots behind and settled in a select area of our vast and untypical capital city. But I still hadn’t put two and two together.

Then, about 25 years ago,  I suffered an odd incident, which made me think even more deeply. One evening at about 9.00, having recently moved into a suburban house in what I regarded as a fairly staid district, I was amazed and infuriated when a stone came crashing through the middle of the front window. I ‘d just turned the light on, and hadn’t had time to close the curtains.

It was quite funny, in a way. It certainly is now.  The previous owners,  rather touchingly,  had placed a ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ sticker right in the middle of the window. I, more sceptical than they about such things,  hadn’t got round to scraping it off. No need now.  For the stone, presumably aimed at this inviting target, hit the sticker smack in the centre before sailing into the middle of the room. It was a chilly night, but  I was so furious that I ran out into the street in shirtsleeves and, bellowing ‘Stop! Vandals!’ chased the three culprits who were just skittering down the road, laughing,  as I emerged from the front door.

Fuelled by rage, I gained on them (nobody, by the way, so much as flicked a curtain or helped me to catch or slow the stone-throwers as I shouted at the top of my (pretty powerful) voice). After a furious half-mile chase, I had them trapped, cowering, in a bush. I pulled the belt out of my trousers and menaced them, while giving them my opinion of their characters in measured tones. I couldn’t see them, as they were deep in the bush, but they couldn’t get away because there was a high fence behind them – they’d mistakenly thought they could get into some field beyond. From what I could see of their backs  as I chased them, I reckon they were about 12 years old.

This was before the days of mobile phones. So (rather ingeniously, I thought) I managed to hail a passing taxi. And I stood there while the driver radioed his control and asked them to call the police. They were very happy to do so, and did. The taxi driver, anxious to earn his living, sped off.

 ‘Now you’re for it’ I confidently told the cowering trio.

I waited for the sound of sirens. And waited, and waited. ‘They’re not coming, are they, mister?’ sneered one of the vandals from the foliage. It was getting cold. I knew enough, even in those days,  to be sure that if I laid a finger on any of them it would mean that I would end up in the dock. Emboldened by the obvious fact that the police weren’t coming, and by my obvious indecision,  the trio shot out of the bush and sped off in different directions.

When I got home (to find my wife completely baffled by my long absence, as she hadn’t heard anything in the back of the house), I called the police.  They said the officers on duty ‘weren’t from round there’ and ‘couldn’t find the road’.  At this point, I suffered an epiphany. A lifelong belief that the police would be of some use in a moment of trouble (which had even survived several years of Marxist revolutionary activity, during which I’d developed a grudging respect for their humorous and restrained handling of demonstrations)  shrivelled up and died.

But soon after that the Cold War lifted me up in a  great wave, which swept me off into Eastern Europe, then to a posting in Moscow and ultimately to two years in the USA. By the time I came back to this country, the things I’d begun to notice had become even  more obvious.

Soon after returning from Washington, I realised that I had not seen a patrolling police officer in a helmet –that symbol of England – since I had stepped off the boat at Southampton.  And I began to wonder, again, about why that was. Then, I became a columnist for another newspaper, and began to get letters and phone calls from people who had had similar experiences, either of the police being wholly absent, or being indifferent to their problems or of them being hard on them for protecting their own property. I still remember (though can’t now find it in the files), a particularly tragic case of a lawyer whose career was ruined because he was prosecuted and convicted of a crime, after frogmarching a vandal to his local police station.

Eventually, this caused me to research and write my book ‘A Brief History of Crime’, which I still view as the most important book I’m ever likely to write. It contains many months of work in libraries and archives, aimed at trying to find out how, when and where the police had been transformed into the body they are now. A modified version is still available as ‘The Abolition of Liberty’ .  I heard, and still hear, from retired and serving police officers who accept the points it makes and applaud them. Fundamentally, the police , as I said above, now serve the state, but not the people. The awful case of Fiona Pilkington has always seemed to me to be the perfect instance of the indifference of the police ‘service’ to the sufferings of individual subjects of the Queen. Many other cases, almost as miserable but not quite, go on as you read this.

But of course I also get the sort of stuff which has come my way for pointing out that the police treatment of Andrew Mitchell was officious and needless, and typical of a type of police behaviour which many, many law-abiding and wise members of the public have encountered in recent years. Those who denounce me as ill-informed, or prejudiced, or who claim, nastily, that  I’m motivated by some brush with the law and seeking revenge, are welcome to use these crude methods. They make no impact on me, and I think most observant citizens know that I have a point.

To portray me as some sort of anti-police troublemaker, who doesn’t grieve at the deaths of officers, is just silly abuse. Nor do I doubt the individual courage of most officers.  But then again, there are brave people in my trade too, who go out and get killed  in pursuit of the truth. Even I, a State Registered Coward, have heard the nasty song that bullets sing, and I was in one case very nearly lynched by an enraged crowd in the Congo.  This is an important experience, and I’m not slow to garner credit from it,  but it wouldn’t excuse me for failing to do my job in other respects, nor does the death of Marie Colvin ( for example) mean that other journalists should be immune from criticism.

Let’s argue this with facts and logic. The police officer in Downing Street should have known who Mr Mitchell was, been on good terms with him, respected him as a fellow subject of the Queen (no more, no less) and simply opened the gate. Those  who think that opening the gate would have been in some way terribly risky need to explain why, in that case, it is ever opened at all. On the other hand, they need to explain why, if it could be opened for a car, it couldn’t be opened for a bike.

I personally think that the danger of a Hezbollah truck bomb charging up the street in the intervening seconds is very slight. Indeed, I’m not sure why Hezbollah would bother.  We have surrendered to the IRA and the PLO, and funnel money to Gaza through the EU, so I can’t see where this grave danger comes from. In any case, being a side street, Downing Street is not very vulnerable to such an attack. Where would the truck bomb accelerate for its final run?  If I worked there, I’d be much more worried about being mown down by an accidental ricochet from one of the Heckler and Koch guns the police like to carry about. I’m amazed they don’t ever go off. Whenever I see armed police in an airport, I hurry round the corner. 

The point, by the way, isn’t about the *number* of police who are armed. It is that policing in this country used to be, and ought to be , conducted in such a fashion that a gun is not just superfluous, but an actual hindrance to doing the job. Arming the police at all is a retrograde step. If we really need armed guards on public buildings, then this is the job of the Army. If the government think that will look bad,  they shouldn’t do it at all.  Taking the police away from their proper duties, to act as guards for state buildings, is a grave misuse of that body.

 
I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it. The modern belief among police officers that they are a special corps or squad, and that the rest of us are ‘civilians’,  is very damaging, and utterly contradicts Sir Robert Peel’s original (and still valid) view of what a British police constable should be. The changes in law and practice that led to this state of affairs are explained in my book. My critics should read it, especially before accusing me of ignorance.  Meanwhile, stay safe.

 

 

 

 

What Sort of People are the Christopher Hitchens Fan Club?

I can’t really claim that I never notice the extraordinarily spiteful attacks on me which come from one particular quarter. They're almost impossible to miss. Some of them are on Twitter. Others arrive here directly. Others surface in various places on the Internet. Those responsible claim to be admirers of my late brother, Christopher.

 

THis is fairly new. Until quite recently, most of his American fans didn’t even know I existed (many still don’t), but especially since I wrote about his death, and attended his memorial meeting in New York last April, they have learned that I do. And they don’t like it.

 I haven’t kept a complete log of the sort of thing which has been hurled at me from this quarter, but here are a couple of samples from the past few days: ‘I can’t even see that man’s name without becoming enraged’. ‘How can Peter Hitchens be such a useless piece of **** when his brother was so intelligent?’ ‘I honestly don’t understand how Peter and Christopher Hitchens were brothers’ Plus a lot on the lines of how the wrong one is dead, or we died in the wrong order, and one unimprovably witty contribution (which has now vanished from the web) suggesting that I should have been aborted, so that Christopher could have grown up untroubled by my presence. I should add, in all justice, that I have also had many civilised and friendly communications, direct and indirect, from my brother’s admirers, for which I am grateful . Many of them have been condolences. But that, as most people would agree, is entirely proper and almost to be expected. So I am not saying that these savage and ill-intentioned snarls and curses are typical of the Christopher Hitchens fan club. I have no way of knowing how typical they are. I am saying that they exist, and that they continue to occur quite frequently, and that I find them interesting.

 

Now, of course I don’t like this sort of thing. But that’s not what worries me about it, nor what interests me about it. A lot of people wrongly assume that I oppose ad hominem argument because it pains me personally, and I am too thin-skinned to take a bit of raillery. Not at all. I have said here before that anyone who got through an English boarding school education in my era has already experienced, and survived, most of the nastiest forms of bullying and humiliation available outside an actual torture chamber. We couldn’t go home in the evening, and the terms were long.

 

No, it just gets in the way of discussing the subject - though I would say that it was an actual fact that Professor Nutt’s considerable self-regard shone out of the Channel Four ‘Ecstasy’ programme, and also that the programme was in fact more than a little ludicrous. Sometimes one is allowed to laugh when one’s opponents fall over and land on their bottoms with silly expressions on their faces, or what sort of life would this be? Anyway, I have deployed, dozens of times, the forces of fact and reason against Professor Nutt, and on this occasion he has run into trouble with more than one of his fellow scientists (Professors Iversen and Parrott), just as in the past he has been criticised by Professor Sir Robin Murray, so those who sneer at me that I know nothing about science, and can’t therefore criticise Professor Nutt, had perhaps better go and try their debating methods on these people.

 

However, I do not believe that I have ever suggested that any opponent of mine should have been aborted, or would be better off dead.(I might feel that death would not be a tragedy in the case of some dreadful tyrant, such as Fidel Castro, but this is a man who has himself been responsible for many unjust deaths and much torture and persecution).

 

Of course, it is unusual (though not unknown, nor specially surprising) to have two brothers who are in roughly the same trade, and who disagree about most things. And then there is the added difficulty that one of those brothers lives in, and has a following in the USA, and the other does not, made still more complicated by the fact that both have (rather different though sometimes overlapping) followings in Britain. I suspect I have British readers (for instance) who still don’t know I have a brother or who he is. And it is just as true the other way round. As for the USA, I have a tiny, faint presence, writing occasionally for the American Conservative magazine and doing very infrequent broadcasting appearances there. Only one of my books has ever been published in the USA, because the others deal with specifically British history and concerns, and have no real application to the US. But I have begun to suspect that even this modest existence is too much for some of the CH fan club.

 

I would imagine that my opposition to the Iraq war is much closer to their views than my brother’s keen an unflinching support for it, right to the very end of his life. So what is the problem? Well, over the years I have debated most of the major controversies of our time, and there are two subjects where you regularly meet bilious, hate-filled unreason *simply for holding an opposing point of view* . They are linked. They are religious belief, and hedonism, and the sub-class of hedonism which covers illegal drugs. It is summed up in the statement that 'Nobody can tell me what I do with my own body', the key text of the Century of the Self.

I have a theory that the enormous success of my brother’s anti-God book (which was a colossal seller in the USA) was caused by a huge cultural revolution among American college kids, brought up in Christian homes and Christian towns, arriving at their campuses and throwing off what they regard as the tedious moral shackles of a suburban faith. What they liked about Christopher was that, in debates and TV appearances, he made their pastors and their parents look foolish , and his English Oxford smoothness gave an intellectual cover to what was in most cases an almost elemental rage against their backgrounds. His way of life , the way he dressed, the way he was rude, the way he drank and smoked and swore, was heroic to them. I remember there was a period when sweet-faced young women from Iowa or Nebraska, more used to banana milkshakes than to ardent spirits, put films of themselves on YouTube choking down fiery slugs of Johnnie Walker Black, in emulation and admiration of their hero. I didn’t notice many or any of them lighting up cigarettes in sympathy, for some reason. But they can certainly swear. Oh, my goodness, yes, sir, they can do that. And they can be rude, though the rudeness lacks the curving, beautifully-timed style ( and sheer nerve) that gave my brother’s insults such power.

 

I’m not sure they actually read his writings all that much, though they like to possess them. People often buy books as a modern relics, so that they can own a piece of the ‘ true cross’ . It was noticeable, at the memorial meeting in New York, that those of us sitting near the front, who were family and friends or colleagues, and had read Christopher’s books and articles and reviews, laughed a lot less at the jokes (when his works were read out by others) than those sitting nearer the back, the admirers from a distance who had lined up in the street to get in. For them, these jests were a fresh and novel experience. For the rest of us, they were well-known, enough to conjure a smile, but not a laugh.

 

My suspicion is that, for some of these people, since the very things they admire him for are the very things that I most specifically reject, the idea that I am closely related to him, have a similar education and background, is close to unbearable. They admire him so much that it is close to reverence. They would, if I were dead, or had no opinions, or agreed with Christopher, quite possibly allow me to have a share of that reverence, a member of the Holy Family. But oh dear, what is this? I am not dead. I do have opinions. They are the wrong ones, the wrongest opinions, in fact, that I could possibly have. Yet my voice is eerily similar to their hero’s and I bear the same surname . Help! There is no room in the atheist shrine for me. 

 

Thus it would be better if I did not exist at all. Why? If I am related, and if I am intelligent, then that means that it is possible they may be wrong about God and the Self. And of course it is desperately important to them that they are right. If God exists, and they do not have absolute sovereignty over their bodies, and their dull parents and pompous pastors and priests are correct, or may even have a point,  then their whole choice and way of life, their whole rebellion against the previous generation, is open to question. They don’t even want to consider that possibility. Thus they conclude that I must be stupid, and that it is impossible that my brother and I are really related,  and (in some cases) that they wish I were dead. I treasure the hope that these poor lost children will grow up enough, one day, to see what a sad, hopeless and deluded view of the world this is, and may come to realise – through this very process – that they may possibly be mistaken about greater things as well.

TV for Gnats..or 'The Resurrection Men dig up Karl Marx'

I’ve always liked the expression ‘Resurrection Man’, used in late 18th-century England to describe the unscrupulous gents who dug up freshly-buried corpses for surgeons in need of subjects for dissection. It has a lovely English robustness and grim humour to it. Does anyone else view the world in quite the same way? And Jerry Cruncher, the bank messenger who supplements his income with a bit of resurrection work (in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’), is one of my favourite minor Dickens characters, another being the redoubtable Miss Pross, so wonderfully unlike her French opposite number, Madame Defarge.

 

But there’s really not much excuse for trying to dig up old Karl Marx, who was been weighed down with an enormous and hideous monument to himself in Highgate Cemetery, for 60-odd years (before then, the old man’s grave was much less prominently marked). He was an accomplished journalist and an energetic and interesting thinker, but he was profoundly wrong about economics, and his ideas, alas, became the gospel of a very ugly and gangsterish political movement, which blasted the lives and fortunes of millions of people for 70 miserable years, and whose ugly relics and vast graveyards still litter the planet. So why on earth will the BBC give an hour to his memory on BBC-2 on Monday 1st October? I am interested in this project because I am very slightly involved in it. I was contacted several months ago and asked if I would be interviewed about Marx, as an ex-Trotskyist. Given that the BBC is crawling with left-wingers of various sorts, I assumed this was because they felt the need to have a hostile voice. They did, but the trouble was that there isn’t all that much to say.

Marx’s fundamental error was to assume that there was such a thing as ‘capitalism’, that is to say that normal economic relations were a specific state of being, out of which humanity could escape by adopting a rather vague alternative known as ‘socialism’. I always object, these days, to the very idea of ‘capitalism’. It treats remorseless reality as a dogmatic choice. You might as well call weather ‘ rainism and sunism’, as if we had some way of creating and dwelling in an alternative atmosphere which dispensed with the earth’s climate as it is, and instead provided perpetual delight, warmth, fertility, plenty and joy (details unspecified, to be supplied after you’ve handed over state power to me). But not so the BBC. They chose to rank Old Karl alongside Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek, as a towering economist of our age. He is to be number three in a series of three ‘masters of Money’ on BBC2 at 9.00 on Monday evening. I’m not myself sure that Hayek ranks with Keynes in influence or importance, though he is certainly interesting and original. I tend to think that he (like Keynes, only more so ) has been done in by his disciples, who have made more out of his ideas than Hayek would ever have wished to do.

 

The same thing happened to Keynesianism under, for example, Macmillan, who went far beyond what the great man himself would have sanctioned. Even the most rigorous economic conservatives have to concede that Keynes engaged practically in the real world, and was often right in his actions because his understanding was so great. But he never pretended, as the Marxists do, to a total understanding of reality. Nor, I think, did Hayek. The trouble with economies is that they are wherever they are when you need to fix them, and are seldom if ever easy to subject to formulae or idealistic solutions. Take our own, just now. A conservative person can do little, because the British economy is so dependent on welfare payments and high taxation that a sudden withdrawal of these things would probably kill it, just as a starving man can be killed by being given what would normally be a healthy square meal. A moral and cultural revolution must precede an economic one. Economics, as Keynes and Hayek( and Marx) knew well is subject to politics, morality, human desire and self-discipline (or the lack of it) habit and tradition. Not to mention the existence or non-existence of the rule of law, the thing which I tend to feel is vital to any truly successful state, and which is itself founded on Christian principles.

But anyway, I found myself sitting on an old chair in a bizarre, almost derelict house in West London which had recently been used as the set for ‘the King’s Speech’, being interviewed on film (though not by Miss Flanders, whose involvement I knew nothing of) about Karl Marx. The result can be seen on Monday evening, two very brief cameo appearances, in which I laugh at the idea of an ‘alternative’ to ‘capitalism’, and in which I quote from my book , ‘The Rage Against God’ that ‘Utopia can only ever be approached across a sea of blood, and you never get there’. Well, better than nothing, but what I had hoped to get across was that intelligent modern revolutionaries see that Marx was in fact a prophet of globalism and of the cultural and moral destruction which is engendered by the race for wealth. That’s why they backed the invasion of Iraq and the new multiculti, liberal interventionist, Hillary Clintonised USA. And it’s why conservatives like me dig in our heels about closing borders and defending national sovereignty and monoculture. In the words of the old bearded one : ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. ‘The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.’

 

And then again :’ The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.

 

'It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.’

 

Spooky, eh, when you think that it was published in 1848? Marx turns out not to have been the prophet of Lenin and Stalin, who hated God, wanted absolute power and needed a pretext for seizing it, but to have been the prophet of the Canton sweatshop, the computer age and the sweeping away of national borders. That is a really interesting subject, and so is the Gramscian cultural and moral revolution which has helped to make it possible, and which has accompanied it. Alas, Miss Flanders’s programme (which is crammed with silly parables and games to explain matters to simple minds, and rapid editing, to help any gnats who may be watching cope with their short attention spans. TV for gnats is increasingly common, I find) is much more about whether Marx has anything to say about the current banking crisis. In my view, the answer to that is a resounding ‘Nope’. There’s also a silly failed joke about how a ‘Marxist Broadcasting Corporation’ would have reported the events of the last few years, which looks to me remarkably like what the BBC has actually been doing. See for yourselves on Monday evening.

Plebs? No, but I wish they'd remember we are their bosses

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

Security was made for man, not man for security. The point of all these searches, gates, checks, X-rays and stupid questions is – we are told – to keep us safe.

So why is it that the people in charge of these systems act as if they were prison warders processing us for a ten- year sentence?

I have no love for Andrew Mitchell. I know from personal experience that he swears too much. But after a week in which the National Union of Jobsworths has sought to smear and destroy him, I have decided to take Mr Mitchell’s side.

Why? Partly because I have had enough of officious people in uniform, whose wages I pay but who – at best – regard me as a nuisance.

They have no need to be like this. The British Army (one of the last institutions in the country that is any good) won golden opinions for the way its soldiers handled Olympic security with charm and competence.

Mr Mitchell simply wanted to ride his bicycle – democratic, clean, quiet, and a form of transport I think all politicians should be compelled to use – through a gate. He’d done it before.

Had he been sprawled arrogantly on the back seat of a big fat Government car, flanked by smarmy bureaucrats, he’d have been waved through. But no, PC Jobsworth ruled, probably from behind his machine gun, that it was ‘policy’ to make Mr Mitchell go through the side gate. Ah ‘policy’, the obstructive jack-in-office’s excuse for refusing to be helpful, in our supposed free- market economy.

Your favourite marmalade has disappeared from the shelves? It’s ‘company policy’. You have to endure two minutes of pointless, deafening, half-witted announcements every time your train approaches or leaves a station? It’s ‘company policy’.

This is just another way of saying that you count for nothing, and your complaint will be tossed straight into the bin.

And then there’s the bit about how Mr Mitchell ‘said’ he was the Chief Whip. Said? How could this officer not have known? When I worked at the House of Commons, in another age, the wise, calm, helpful constables who staffed the place made it their business to know by sight the name of every single MP, 630 or more, within a week of a General Election.

If I were in charge of the police guarding Downing Street, I would get rid of any constable working there who could not identify by sight and without hesitation every member of the Cabinet.

This episode will, I hope, rebound hard on those who seem to me to have abused their positions to make trouble for a Minister. They should remember who employs them, and who pays their wages.

They are not paid to leak such matters to the papers. This is lawless personal spite, not law enforcement.

If they really thought the law had been broken, then they should have arrested Mr Mitchell.
Our police force has gone badly wrong and it’s time it laid down its guns, sold its helicopters, removed its baseball caps and stompy boots, and went back to patrolling the streets on foot – and on bikes.

That’s my ‘policy’.

Only fools swallow Nutt's gibberish

The much-touted Channel 4 programme on ecstasy turned out to be rather pathetic. Professor David Nutt, the noted propagandist for weaker drug laws, oozed so much self-regard that the studio audience almost drowned in it.

Poor Jon Snow, looking about 90 and trying with all his might to get down with the kids, greeted Old Nutt’s pseudo-scientific gibberish with gullible cries of wonder, a sad comedown for this normally skilled and probing inquisitor.

In the middle of it all, a vast plastic brain, looking like a discarded prop from a Seventies episode of Doctor Who, flashed and flickered to illustrate Old Nutt’s vague but ambitious speculations about the workings of this mysterious, little-understood organ.

Then there was Dr Evan Harris, who ‘bravely’ volunteered to take part in the trial. Did he take ecstasy? Nobody’s sure. Dr Harris’s pupils are always so dilated anyway, due to his wonder at his own cleverness, that nobody – including him – could be sure if he had been given real MDMA or a dummy pill.

What was this all about? I reckon there is, or soon will be, very big money behind the exploitation of mood-altering drugs (look at the vast commercial success of fishy, risky ‘antidepressants’).

The only obstacles are those pesky people, like the courageous Professor Andy Parrott, who warn that the risks of drugs such as ecstasy hugely outweigh their joys. Professor Parrott, though not on the platform and often interrupted, was the true star of the programme.

A life of genius and real drama

Sometimes the death of an actor gives me a special pang – especially when it’s one whose face I have known since childhood. I was always fascinated by the mysterious, faintly scornful foreign features of Herbert Lom, whose performance in the original and unequalled version of The Ladykillers was a work of genius.

Now he has died, aged 95, I find that he really was mysterious, and haunted by an intolerable regret, more dramatic than any drama. First, he was a Bohemian aristocrat whose real name was Herbert Karel Angelo Kuchacevic ze Schluderpacheru. You can see why he stuck to Lom.

Second, he arrived in England as a refugee in 1939 with his Jewish girlfriend. He was allowed in by the Dover Customs officers. She was sent back to Prague and, in due course, was murdered in a German concentration camp. You could make a film of that, but alas, Herbert Lom is no longer available to star in it.

Why does this country still maintain a vast, expensive apparatus for wiping Moscow off the map? Trident is as obsolete as the Maginot Line, built for a danger that is over and will not arise again.

Meanwhile, our conventional Armed Forces, our real protection against unpredictable risks, are being made redundant and sold for scrap. Sir Nick Harvey is quite right to open a debate on the severe shrinking of our oversized bomb.

Can we really believe that Mr Slippery, Etonian and holder of an Oxford first-class degree, doesn’t know what Magna Carta means? If he doesn’t know, then things are even worse than I thought (and that means very bad indeed). If he does, what was he playing at?

You Never Know.... Oh, yes, you do

The worst possible argument for keeping Trident is the most common one. It can be summed up as  ‘You Never Know…’

We all know people who live their lives on this principle. Their houses are jammed with clutter, their attics and garages and garden shed bulge with books, manuals for obsolete devices, old mowers, sheaves of gas bills and bank statements, unwearable items of clothing. None of this stuff will ever be looked at or used again. One day, the Salvation Army, or some house clearance service, will cart it all away (mostly to the dump, though some will end up in charity shops where it should have been all along)  after the owners are dead.

I find this quite forgiveable,  even charming, though I would have an almost permanent skip outside my house, so that I could throw large things away more easily, if I could. I think it’s Davies, in ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ who takes an unreasoning, fierce joy in hurling large, unwanted objects overboard from the yacht ‘Dulcibella’ , particularly stoves. It occurs to me that I can’t remember Davies ever having a Christian name in that marvellous book, much as I didn’t have a Christian name during my prep-school years.

But while it’s charming in an individual, and understandable, it’s stupid for a government to cling to things for which there is no rational case.

Britain built its first nuclear bomb ( and it was a big struggle ) largely because the 1945-51 Labour government realised that in those days it was essential to maintain any sort of standing with the USA. Ernest Bevin, who I suspect of having been a great man,  is supposed to have resolved to go ahead with the project after being treated like an office boy by Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, James Byrnes,  a not-very-well-informed Southerner. He is supposed to have said : ‘I do not want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked at, or to, as I was. We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’

A similar sentiment was later voiced by Bevin’s opponent and left-wing rival, Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, who said he did not want a future Foreign Secretary to go ‘naked into the conference chamber’, as he rejected his old left-wing friends’ calls for unilateral British nuclear disarmament in the 1957, during the first early flourishing of anti-bomb sentiment in Britain.

There’s a very interesting story attached to this. Labour’s conference (then a real, living body which took actual votes on policy) voted to ban the  bomb in 1960, and Hugh Gaitskell made one of his two most powerful speeches (the other being when he had correctly warned that British entry into European union would be ‘the end of a thousand years of history’) . On this occasion he said that there ‘some of us, Mr Chairman, who will fight, and fight, and fight again to save the party we love’.

There was then a powerfully-organised campaign, throughout the Labour Party( then still an organisation with a large and active membership) run by a body called the campaign for Democratic Socialism. This worked through Labour ward meetings to reverse the Ban the Bomb policy.

By this time Britain had the Bomb, though it was a close-run thing. One of the main reasons’ for Bevin’s annoyance with Byrnes had been the ingratitude of the USA for Britain’s original work on developing the Atomic Bomb, and the shut-down of US co-operation.

C.P. Snow, ( regular readers here will know of my soft spot for thus much-abused author) , write two novels on this topic. The first ‘The New Men’ concerns the struggle to develop the bomb, in many cases by men of the Left, scientists of the pre-1939 sort who were often utopians, in a place which closely resembles the Harwell laboratory . the second ‘Corridors of Power’, deals with a Tory Defence minister who tries (with much help from the civil servants and some discreet American backing) to abandon the British bomb on pragmatic grounds. This turned out to be politically impossible at that stage, as it would have been. There was still a good rational argument (in my view unanswerable) that Soviet domination of Western Europe was ultimately only prevented by MAD, and that a British and a French nuclear force made MAD that much more assured, because the Soviet could never be sure, that, even if the USA held back, their cities were safe from nuclear destruction.  Both books are still well worth reading now, as historical documents and stories.

One of Snow’s attractions to me was his willingness to deal with large issues of this kind, intelligently and with great background knowledge. Snow had been in the centre of civil service decision-making since the beginning of the 1939-45 war, and knew what he was writing about.  He was very good at describing intrigue (‘The Masters’) trials  and scandals(‘The Sleep of Reason’ and ‘The Affair’), fascinated by science and scientists, and frank about his own left-wing passions. I’ve never seen quite why D.H.Lawrence and Henry James (who, as H.G.Wells once sniped, ‘chewed more than he bit off’) are supposed to be such Olympian geniuses by comparison.

Like another dedicated left-winger, Claud Cockburn, he seems to have had a respect for the type of conservative who is so secure in his position and beliefs that he doesn’t give a damn about offending his own side when necessary. But I digress.

The problem here is that at some point the argument about the Bomb got mixed up with the pro-Soviet Left’s  desire to break up NATO and make the USSR the principal military, diplomatic and economic power in Europe. Part of this resulted from the left’s revulsion (in my view justified) against Harry Truman’s use of the bomb in Hiroshima, and even more so by the second bomb on Nagasaki. A sort of case can perhaps be made for Hiroshima, though many historians, with access to the full documents of the time,  now dispute the idea that Hiroshima forced Japan to surrender (she was about to do so anyway). But none can be made for Nagasaki. 

By the way, the point about the bombs in ’The War Game’ being Soviet ones is this. Much of the CND case, and indeed the strongest part of it,  was about the immorality and wickedness of even maintaining such cruel weapons, let alone using them. But CND campaigned only against British bombs, not least because anyone who campaigned against the Soviet bomb would have been locked up if they had done so on the territory of the USSR. This fact rather made the point, to most supporters of the Bomb, of what the argument was all about. But it didn’t seem to have occurred to most CND supporters, especially in the ‘Ban Cruise’ era, where much of the anti-cruise propaganda seemed to suggest that cruise missiles wouldn’t just be based here, but used to attack Britain.
The argument that the West’s nuclear weapons were specifically meant *not* to be used, and that if they ever were used they would have failed in their purpose, didn’t always get across.

Having dwelt in that era, and under that supposed threat, I must confess to having been entirely free of fears about dying in a nuclear holocaust, as Mutual Assured Destruction made perfect sense to me, not least because the Cuba crisis had shown that it worked.

I was much more worried that Europe would disarm and become Sovietised, or even that a Soviet invasion might succeed. People should remember that the USSR was constantly trying to detach West Germany from NATO with plans for nuclear-free zones and so forth.
The Kremlin had crushed opposition by force or secret police terror in East Germany(19530 Poland (1956) , Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), and it had compelled Poland’s government to crush Solidarity after 1980 as well, meantime invading Afghanistan. The installation of the Pioneer (SS20) missiles was aimed ( as the novelist James Buchan puts it in his interesting book ‘A Heart’s Journey in Winter’) directly at the Social Democratic Party of Germany.  Left-wing Germans might have disavowed Marxism. But they had no special love for the USA, and were still sentimentally attached to socialist internationalism. Thjeior former leader, Willi Brandt, had been much closer to the Soviets than he had ever let on, and not just because of the east German agent at his elbow, Gunter Guillaume.  And all Germans dreaded having another war on German soil.

There were millions of Germans held hostage in East Germany. Meanwhile, the then-perpetual German Foreign Secretary Hans-Dieter Genscher,  worked hard to smooth relations both with east Berlin and Moscow. It could have happened. German neutrality wasn’t impossible. And then, so much for NATO.

 And after that, what? . Well, people said Finland, a Western country forced into neutrality by Soviet Power, wasn’t so bad. In fact, the Kremlin had a right to veto appointments to the Finnish government, but general Western prosperity, and the very existence of NATO, kept Finalnd freer than it would otherwise have been. Imagine, instead, a Europe in which all the countries were ‘Finlandised’ and there was no NATO counterbalance. There were powerful Communist Parties in Italy and France, and a big fellow-travelling movement in Britain, concentrated in the trade unions.

Here , readers will also see that the Warsaw Pact planned carefully for what they hoped would be the future.

But all this is one with Nineveh and Tyre. The Soviet Communist party will never come back. The principal threat to British independence and liberty is from the EU, a a nuclear weapon despite one strange comment here) will certainly not help us shake free of that. Switzerland, which has no bomb, has managed to put up a better fight against Brussels and Berlin than we have. Likewise Norway.

I cannot see any reason why any nuclear-armed power in the Middle East or further east should be interested in destroying London . But if such a threat developed, there are much lower-tech ways of delivering nuclear weapons than the wildly elaborate Trident, or its even more wildly elaborate (and costly) planned successor.  What this country needs is a navy sufficient to protect its shores and to project power in regions where we have influence, or where we need to protect our citizens from piracy.

Our air force needs to be able to defend our skies, and our army to be available to defend our shore and to be sent, rapidly and effectively, to protect our people and interests abroad. To achieve this, we need to work constantly to maintain a skilled core of professionals, and to update our equipment to the latest standards.

I might add that the main threat to our strategic independence currently comes from the approaching energy crisis, when the forced shutdown of old nuclear and coal-fired power stations will make us wholly dependent on foreign gas and electricity (and unreliable wind). A huge, French-style programme of building nuclear power stations is the only serious answer to this, and would be a much better way of spending the money than on the Thunderbirds fantasy, Trident, a weapon bigger than the country which owns it, designed to attack an enemy who ceased to exist 20 years ago and who will never return..

 

 

 

 

 

Bin the Bomb

 

Long ago, before I grew up, I was a great enthusiast for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I had lots of badges. I was once in trouble for trying to get into a secret government nuclear fallout shelter (Regional Seat of Government) in Cambridge.  I went on CND marches – I remember in particular one in Easter 1966, one of the last of the old Aldermaston marches, though by then they started in the Berkshire village where our deterrent is made, and finished in Trafalgar Square, rather than the original plan  when they did it the other way round. I think there was a big puppet show, featuring figures drawn by Gerald Scarfe, and shouted, inaudible speeches in the March wind and we all sang a song, to the tune of ‘Jerusalem’ , the only line of which I recall is ‘…. And that the bland shall lead the bland’.

It was all a bit like a church outing, including sleeping on the floors of church halls, proclaiming our faith  and a sharing a feeling of uplift. I think it was later the same year that I went on a  much smaller march to the Polaris warhead factory in Burghfield, near Reading. I have never got so wet in my life, but we glowed with righteousness as we trailed past the fenced-off hummocks, amid the piney heathland, where the engines of mass death were made. Soon after that came Vietnam which took our minds off the Bomb, and then the thrills of Bolshevism in the International Socialists

I can’t recall exactly when I realised that it was all drivel. Some time in my post-university years, I think when, beneath the leaden skies of chilly Swindon, I confronted reality for the first time in many years. It came to me that deterrence actually worked, was working, protected me personally and that I really ought to support it.

I suspect my Bolshevik training helped me along. There were many disputes among the comrades about the Soviet bomb, with the orthodox Communists torn on the issue, as they had tagged along with CND in the hope of picking up members (and because British nuclear disarmament suited Soviet foreign policy). But it was of course ludicrous, as the Soviet fatherland had its own engines of mass death, pointed at us, and – as I would personally discover years later in the secret H-Bomb town of Kurchatovsk –did a handy line in pro-Bomb propaganda for home consumption.

For us Trotskyists, who evaded any kind of of Soviet loyalty it was easier ( well, mostly, there was a deep difficulty about this for some of us, who insisted that the Soviet state, though corrupt, was a ‘degenerated’ or ‘deformed’ worker’s state, and so ultimately to be defended against capitalism).  I remember a mocking chant, to the tune of ‘The Red Flag’ which ran ( I think) ‘The Workers’ Bomb is deepest green, it’s not as black as it might seem, degenerated though it be, it’s still the People’s Property, so raise the Workers’ Bomb on high, beneath its shade we’ll live and die, and though our comrades all shout ‘b***s’ , we’ll stand beneath it when it falls’.

As indeed we would have done. It all faded away until, back in the early 1980s, the cruise and Pershing Missile controversy erupted. It was important.  The USSR had begun to position ‘Pioneer’ or (as we called them) SS-20 medium rage nuclear missiles in European Russia, capable of reaching Western European targets. So what?

Well, so quite a lot. NATO, in those days a real alliance designed to deter a Soviet advance into Western Europe, was conventionally feeble. Its troops were poorly co-ordinated (the only standard equipment across all armies was the official NATO sickbag) , hugely outnumbered by the mighty GSFG ( the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, so vast that East Germany all but sank under their weight. You could hardly move in the GDR without meeting them).

Our forces were also  in the wrong places, for insoluble political reasons. US troops, for instance, the biggest and best-equipped, were in the US zone of West Germany. But the main Soviet thrust, had it come, would have gone across the North German plain where the smaller, less powerful British and German armies were mainly to be found.

In any case. We relied on the following calculation. If the GSFG ever did advance, we would eb bound to counter with tactical nuclear weapons. The USSR would then either have to give up, or respond by going Ballistic, and launching a strategic attack against the USA, so inviting Mutual Assured Destruction (the famous, and misnamed MAD, which stopped even the silliest of politicians from contemplating war in those days, because it would obviously be insane to start a war. Look at them now. They can’t stop starting wars).

Well, if Chicago were incinerated, the USA would be bound to retaliate, and the theory worked. But what if the Soviet response to battlefield nukes was instead to fry Frankfurt, Munich, Lyon and Manchester, using the SS-20s? Would the USA risk Chicago, or Kansas City, for Europe then? Doubtful.

The SS-20s broke the chain of MAD.  Destruction wasn’t mutually-assured any more.  In which case it wasn’t as mad to start a war in Europe as it had been. And who was going to do that?  Well, guess.

A Soviet conventional advance across Europe had become thinkable for the first time in decades. In that case, the countries of Western Europe, fearing this possibility and (having no realistic defence against it which didn’t involve a European nuclear war) would be under pressure to accommodate themselves to the Soviet will in a way that had been unknown since the founding of NATO.   

Hence the decision to deploy American-controlled, but European-based weapons which could retaliate against Soviet cities if Western European cities were attacked by SS-20s. 

This, by the way, was the context for the now-famous argument I had with my brother in 1984 or thereabouts, during which he said that he didn’t care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon. It was, in my view, the defeat of the SS-20 ploy that led to the end of the USSR.

At that time, I had a pro-NATO sticker on my car , mainly to annoy my Oxford neighbours, who all had CND stickers on theirs, opposing what they called ‘cruise’. This was the time of Greenham Common and the Greenham Common Women, and also for a revival of CND, which had almost vanished in the 1970s. This time it even had membership cards, which it never had the first time round.

There were special showings of Peter Watkins’s gritty propaganda film ‘The War Game’, stupidly refused a showing by the BBC when it was first made in the 1960s. This shows, in the style of a documentary , the effects of a nuclear attack on parts of Southern England. And the panic infecting the country in the days before. It’s rather a charming period-piece now, with its pre-metric measurements, helmeted bobbies, phone boxes, vicars and BBC accents.

But like all such films (think also of the slicker American film ‘The Day After’ ) its scenario for the outbreak of war is unbelievably feeble and incredible.  The truth was that, after the Cuba standoff had ended in compromise, it was hard to see what could actually bring about a superpower nuclear exchange. ‘Dr Strangelove’, with its (credible but false) suggestion that most of those involved were unhinged, probably persuaded more people.

All I needed to do, when ‘The War Game’ was shown near me, was to get up during the post-film discussion and point out the obvious but neglected fact that the nuclear explosions we had all just watched were the explosions of *Soviet* weapons, aimed at us.  From then on, the CNDers didn’t really recover. I recall (after one such showing in Hampstead), infuriating my defeated opponents by cheerily helping them stack the chairs after the confused audience had gone.

Well, all that’s over now. The GSFG, the Soviet Army, the Warsaw Pact armies, are just so much scrap and reminiscence. The USSR is gone, the last SS-20 is in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, Greenham Common has gone back to the land,  and Russia has about as much interest in invading Western Europe as I have in developing an enthusiasm for Glam Rock.

So why do we continue to main this vast apparatus for destroying Moscow, called Trident? I have no idea.  The ideologies, the rivalries, the ideas that caused it to be built are now so much yellowing paper in an archive. The conflict it was designed to prevent never took place and never will. Our significance in the world has shrunk in spite of our missiles . Ernest Bevin wanted a British bomb so that the USA wouldn’t order us about. Perhaps he was right in those days, but it seems to me that we would be better able to resist American pressure if we’d spent the money on building an economy instead. 

So why not get rid of it? Because Labour is still afraid that if it bans the bomb, people will realise just how radical it is. And because the Tories have long relied on a noisy fake patriotism to cover up the fact that they have sold the country to the European Union, the greatest British diplomatic defeat of modern times. Did Trident preserve us from that? Will it help us get out? Will it keep us warm when we can’t afford the imported gas any more? 

In the Heat of the Night, and... A Threat to Kick me

A moment for some general conversation. First, on the advantages and disadvantages of bicycling. Take yesterday. I had various business to do in and around my home town. No bus route exists that could have taken me directly on any of the journeys I made. Had I used a car, apart from sustaining our corrupt relationship with the world’s most unpleasant regimes, apart from having pumped a good deal of filth into the air and inflicted unpleasant noise on a lot of people, I would have had to have left my vehicle occupying valuable urban space, and contributed to the general tinny, garish ugliness of the modern British street-scene.

If you doubt the last point, take a photograph of any picturesque or handsome streetscape in this country. You’ll barely be conscious of it as you click the shutter, but when you examine the picture later you will see how the human proportions are disrupted, and the subtle colours of local stone or aged brick driven into the background, by the irritating presence of so many ugly steel boxes, whose height and general shape conflicts with buildings and street furniture designed for humans.

Later, my chores and errands done, I was able to escape the 21st century by pedalling vigorously for about half an hour, to a point where I finally escaped bypass roads and ribbon development, and dropped off the edge of the modern world into a landscape which (if you ignore the barbed wire) could have been painted by Constable. During the next hour or so of fast riding, I passed a handsome country house, a fine old 17th-century bridge,  a beautiful old mill and two unspiled villages containing 700-year-old houses still in continuous occupation. I stopped to admire a very beautiful herd of pedigree cattle, and to observe two rainbows. I wasn’t making any noise, so I could (once I was out of range of the endless whoosh of the Motorway) able to hear the wind in the trees, one of the loveliest and most thought-inducing sounds known to man.  I did all this without in any way disrupting, damaging, polluting or disturbing the peaceable landscape which I crossed.

Most of the roads I used were almost empty of cars (Though where they weren’t empty, the stink and noise was especially unpleasant because it broke into the peace and purity). No Wahhabi oil regime needed to fuel this journey. It could be done on sausages, toasted teacakes, fried eggs or any other easily available fuel. The wear and tear I inflicted on the roads ( a big problem these days, when repairs are less and less frequent) was minimal. I didn’t run over a single squirrel, hedgehog, fox or badger, or slay any birds.

The first disadvantage is the failure of imagination on the part of some rural drivers, who think they can go past you at 50 miles an hour at nine or ten inches distance, without inconveniencing you. Not all drivers are like this. Another disadvantage was one I didn’t notice at the time. I had, apparently, been in danger when , at around 10.00 am, I rode my machine across Magdalen Bridge in Oxford.

This is one of the loveliest stretches of road in the world (and would be lovelier without any cars), as it provides the first, slowly opening prospect of Oxford’s curved High Street, celebrated in verse  (‘The streamlike windings of that glorious street’,  W. Wordsworth) and in a fine painting by J.M.W.Turner. But, as I now know, it is fraught with unseen perils. A person whose name I shall not reproduce here went on to Twitter yesterday morning, to boast:  ‘Just resisted the urge to kick Peter Hitchens off his bicycle on Magdalen Bridge’ .

Did he mean it? It is rather worrying if so. As restraint weakens in our society, how long before such threats become actions?  Would the police be interested ? (of course not, they’re much too busy refusing to open the gate).  He seemed to be boasting of his own self-restraint. Had I been in a big fat car, of course, it would not have crossed his mind to rush in the road and kick my vehicle. Is this why unpopular politicians resort to cars, rather than take the Andrew Mitchell option, and sensibly pedal through the congested streets of London?

But really, here, I have set out the simple arguments why, back in 1978 or thereabouts, I began cycling to work in London. There were no bicycle lanes, no helmets, and most of my colleagues thought it was a sort of madness to do so. At best, it was regarded as eccentric. I thought then, as I think now, that cars make the world uglier and make us dependent on oil in a way we really could do without. I also happen to think that, after cigarettes, cars are the principal cause of ill-health, whether it be back problems, heart disease or any of the other many problems caused by lack of exercise, in our country.  And that is not to mention the thousands of needless deaths and injuries which are caused by motor vehicles, few of them reported because they happen one by one, but each a vast tragedy in the lives of those involved.

In those days I counted myself an environmentalist. I joined Friends of the Earth, because I reckoned I was a friend of the Earth.  I thought I should simply make my personal contribution to reducing this – and I was astonished, over time, by the benefits. I still recall, the first time I rode up Primrose Hill on the way home, the terrifying dizziness I felt as my heart, for the first time in years, started doing its job again, dislodging globs of fat and gunk from my artery walls. I knew for certain that, even if bicycling wasn’t doing me any good, not bicycling had been doing me harm. I’m amused to this day when left-wing persons are surprised that I ride a bicycle. It doesn’t compute, for them. Nor does my support for railway nationalisation. But that is because they simply don’t understand what conservatives are, or what they think.

I also noticed on Twitter than a source which looked very much like a manufacturer of cycle helmets was having a go at me for saying  (on the Jeremy Vine show at about 12.30 pm on Tuesday)that I wasn’t convinced of the arguments for such helmets. Don’t they have an interest? Could their view be influenced by it?

By the way, can anyone explain to me an oddity of modern traffic lights?  Being a law-abiding person, I stop at red lights. This morning I did so at a junction, and waited, and waited, and waited for the light to change. It didn’t, and for far longer than usual. There was no other traffic, in any direction,  as it was quite early.  Then, when a car came up behind me, it instantly switched to green. Do these things now have sensors, which respond to cars, but not to bicycles? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

I’ve also noticed that on streets in London where there is a succession of lights, they seem to be phased in such a way that only an Olympic cyclist could possibly pass through more than one without having to stop. Whereas cars , with their greater acceleration, can keep up continuous motion, cyclists, who have to make a personal physical effort to accelerate away from a standing position, are repeatedly halted. Does anyone know how this is arranged and calculated?

Now, back to hanging for a moment. Yes, I was teasing when I pointed out the correlation (not causation, remember everyone) between climate and murder in the USA.  Though I do think that in this case the real link has more to do with the former existence of slavery, a catastrophic curse on America as a civilisation, there is more to it than that. I am quite certain that the calculating crook, of the type one would hope to deter by having an effective death penalty, is not significantly deterred by the feeble street theatre of ‘execution’ in any US state. It’s only designed to fool people, and of course (like all such things, including the New Labour project’s supposed right-wingness) it manages to fool a fair number of unthinking people at both ends of the political spectrum

As I so often say, the delay is so great, the likelihood of being executed so small, that these executions ( alas) serve much more to keep certain politicians and parties in office than they do to restrain murder. This is most notable in those states where the death penalty officially exists, but where it is never carried out.
Calculating criminals, whose lives are at stake, pay more attention to the facts, and less to propaganda.

A person calling himself Martin Narey, also on twitter, attacked me for what I’d said, saying that the State of Louisiana had(I think ) 150 times as much gun crime as Britain, despite having a death penalty. Is this the same Martin Narey who used to be a prominent bureaucrat in Britain’s pointless warehousing organisation, known as the prison system?  

I don’t know, but in any case, I was referring to knife *and* gun crime, and I think knife crime is currently very serious in this country (gun crime will come, be sure of it) . More important, Louisiana, ‘has’ the death penalty in much the same way that Hampshire ‘has’ hurricanes.

As far as I can gather, Louisiana has executed 28 murderers in the last 36 years. But it has something in the region of 500 murders a year, around twice the murder rate in New York . On 10th January 2010, the major local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, reported that ‘State’s death penalty becoming a rarity ; Bordelon execution was first since 2002’

‘Thursday's execution of Gerald Bordelon, happened only because the convicted killer waived his appeals, hastening his death by many years. His was the first execution since 2002, when Leslie Dale Martin was executed for the rape and murder of a Lake Charles woman in 1981.

'The dramatic decline in Louisiana executions since 1987, when the state briefly led the nation in that statistic, comes at a time when, nationally, both executions and the imposition of new death sentences have waned significantly.’

The report said that Texas ‘still executes convicts at a steady clip’. I’ll come to that in a moment.

Bordelon, by the way, had strangled his 12-year-old stepdaughter, after kidnapping her at knifepoint and forcing her to, well, I won’t go on, it’s too distressing, look it up if you must.  There was no doubt of his guilt. He showed police where he’d put her poor defiled body. But the crime was committed in 2002, and he was convicted in 2006. And he waived his right to appeal. And in the period during which his was the sole execution, approximately 40,000 murders were committed in that state. Call that a death penalty?  Call it a deterrent? Oh, do come on, Mr Narey.

So what about Texas? Since 1976, Texas has executed 480 people (an average of about 13 a year) . But Texas has a population of nearly 26 million, more than five times that of Louisiana. Its annual homicide rate is now around 1,250. So, that’s roughly one execution for every 100 homicides.  And are they speedy? I would say not. Among the most recent to be executed is Marvin Lee Wilson,  put to death in August this year, who committed his murder in 1992.

I’d be interested in any sources for more detailed statistics on this, such as numbers off death sentences passed, compared with numbers of executions, average times spent on death row before execution, numbers of condemned murderers dying of old age on death row etc. But as far as I can see the death penalty in the USA is a great big red herring, whose purpose is political and not aimed at imposing justice.

 

Oh, by the way, yes, 'A Warning to the Curious' was a reference to the wonderful M.R. James ghost story of that name. Do not, I advise you, 'experiment' with things you do not fully understand. The results may be permanent, and unexpected.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Street of Shame

Swearing at the Police is wrong, and foolish too.

I have to say that even in my Trotskyist marching days I didn’t swear at the police. It would have struck me then, as it strikes me now, as a bad idea for all manner of reasons.  Though it wasn’t because I, then or ever, thought that police officers were tender plants who would wilt at the sound of expletives. It was just that if they didn’t like it, they were  rather better-placed than most people to make trouble for me.

But that’s a particular point. Though I don’t always succeed, I try very hard to keep from swearing at anybody, especially anybody who can’t hit back. I have a feeling – which I’ve explained here before – that swearing is a display of power, a way of letting someone know that he can’t hit back. I did also once, as an experiment, try swearing back at one of those louts who tells you to **** off when you ask him to pick up the litter he has just dropped. It was curiously unsatisfying. Perhaps my plummy voice isn’t menacing enough, but I ended up just feeling a bit soiled, worried about becoming what I had beheld. So these days I tend to riposte cheerily with ‘How unimprovably witty and trenchant!’, which at least has the virtue of baffling them.

There are many other arguments against the level of bad language in modern Britain, and I still stand by my view that our culture is much too relaxed about four-letter words. They’re there for moments of grave stress and danger, and also as a warning that the next step will be violence. Make them too common, and, like any other currency, they’ll lose their value and their power, and we’ll also lose an important safety zone between civility and blows.

We’ve all heard the story about the  soldier who (as soldiers do)  used the f-word and the c-word as others would use punctuation . When one day he dropped a General Purpose Machine Gun on his foot (this hurts) he stood mouthing silently for about a minute, unable to think of anything suitable to say. He hadn’t any words in his vocabulary to cope with the occasion.

So I’m not very sympathetic to Andrew Mitchell who, as far as I know, swears rather too much.  Nor am I a friend of his. Nor do I support his party, nor seek to defend the government he helps to sustain. Nor do I care at all whether he stays in his government job or quits. I’d go further. I’d say that if he quits, the incident will have provided a useful safety valve for our unresponsive, arrogant elite, who can pretend, with such sackings that ordinary people ( or ‘plebs’?) have some say in the government of the country. They don’t, of course. Personally,  I’d rather be called a ‘pleb’, and have some influence over events,  than be smarmed by politicians and have my views utterly ignored. I’m quite proud of having my traceable origins in the Portsmouth slums and, further back, in the Wiltshire and Cornish countryside.

I didn’t write anything about Mr Mitchell’s Downing Street confrontation last week because the capital punishment issue took up so much time and space, and also because I had a nagging voice in my mind saying ‘Yes, it’s wrong to swear at the police. But isn’t it also wrong for the police to be as officious as they often are these days, and have we heard the whole story?’

Plus, as a cyclist, I’ve noticed a petty but annoying development recently, by which bicycles are banned and blocked from places where cars are allowed. How can this be right? A letter in this morning’s ‘Guardian’ summed up my feeling by correctly pointing out that if Mr Mitchell had been sprawled, emperor-like, in the back of a big fat armour-plated ministerial car,  he would have been waved through by the very same officers who ordered him to get off his machine and walk through a side gate.

So why was he held up when he was riding a bike, a more democratic and far cheaper form of transport, leaving aside any contentious green and environmental considerations? Could it be because the police, like too many of us, see the car as  badge of status, and the bicycle as a sign they are dealing with a weaker, less important person, what you might call a ‘pleb’? 

I might add that Mr Mitchell was on his way *out* of Downing Street, so there was no doubt he had already established that he had permission to be there. There was no great need to check his credentials to let him out.

According to the original story, he was told ‘ security rules mean they open the main gate as little as possible’.

Is that so? So do they keep two or three ministerial or ambassadorial cars waiting in convoys,  inside and outside , until there are enough of them to justify opening it? And do they tell their impatient passengers that if they wish to leave sooner they must get out of their cars and walk through the pedestrian gate? Do you know, I rather doubt it.

If anyone watched the gate all day, I think they’d find it was opening and shutting the whole time, and opening it for Mr Mitchell (or anyone else)  on his bike really didn’t make much difference to the daily tally. Short of shutting it the whole time, and building a tunnel for the occupants, it’s going to have to be opened quite a lot.  So why not for a cyclist?   I wonder how many cyclists pass through each day, and how many cars and vans? After all, here’s a conundrum. It’s illegal to ride a bike on the pavement, but legal to ride it on the road,  because it’s a vehicle. So why must it stop being a vehicle when it comes to opening a gate designed for vehicles? Again, it seems to come back to the second-class status of bikes and their riders.

So Mr Mitchell, despite his unpleasant foul-mouthed outburst, might have a sort of case.

Then other doubts come trickling in. How did this story reach the ‘Sun’ newspaper, exactly? Who told the ‘Sun’, and on what terms? We’re told that tourists and members of the public were said to have been ‘visibly shocked’. Have any come forward to say so? Did these outraged individuals tell the ‘Sun’ about the incident? Or did someone else? If so, who?

Were the outraged members of the public interviewed as potential witnesses by the outraged police officers? There are enough of them (police officers I mean, not outraged ones necessarily) around there, on both sides of the gate, to do this if necessary.  I’m faintly concerned about this because the tourists who hang around Downing Street are mostly from abroad and wouldn’t have known who Mr Mitchell was (most British people wouldn’t have done, then, either) . They might not even have known he was swearing, foreign swearing being a completely different thing from ours.   And it’s a noisy location. The last time I bicycled past it, which may have been last Wednesday, as it happened, there was a very noisy demonstration on the other side of Whitehall, which seemed to be something to do with legal protection for prostitutes, or ‘sex workers’ as they are now termed. The word ‘SLUT!’ was being used quite vigorously, if I remember rightly, cutting through the mighty roar of London’s traffic. Though not ‘Pleb!’ or ‘****!’.

Since then we seem to have learned a bit about the police officers involved. One was a woman. A connection, which seems to me to be pretty tenuous, was made with the murder of two policewomen in Manchester. This is a horrible event, but it doesn’t actually have much to do with this much less important moment in our national life. They considered arresting him under the Public Order Act, or so we are told.  Well, why didn’t they if they were so appalled?  Chief Whips are not above the law.

The evidence against him could then have been tested, first by the CPS and then on oath in a court of law. This, increasingly,  seems to me to be the most satisfactory ending. It’s been suggested that if Mr Mitchell disputes what has been said,  he should either sue the officers or quit, but I think a criminal court would be a better place.

There’s also a sad thing to add, about how police officers in general (some nobly resist, and I know it) have been transformed from a fairly genial bunch of public servants, generally ready to do a bit of give-and-take with anybody, into grim-jawed and humourless robocops, festooned with machine-pistols, tasers, handcuffs and big clubs, and got up like soldiers in some future fantasy of hunger and chaos.

When, long ago, I worked at the House of Commons, the coppers who guarded the building were of the genial type, big, often bearded, wise, infinitely experienced, discreet and humorous, and boy, did they work at knowing who all the MPs were. The moment the election results were in, they got hold of the leaflets and made picture directories. Within a week or two of the new Parliament assembling they could greet every member by name. Significantly, they still wore the old uniform of tunic and helmet, and I am quite sure this made them behave more like sworn citizens in the office of constable,  and less like cops (the unlovely word the ‘Sun’ likes to use to describe British policemen and policewomen these days).

This was fantastic security, of course, better than any computer, because they also knew instantly if they saw people in parts of the building who shouldn’t have been there.

In those days, there were just a few crowd barriers at the entrance to Downing Street. And the coppers on duty were the old sort. The ludicrous, hideous Ceausescu-style gates that are now there had not yet been built, and ‘security’ wasn’t the ultimate, unanswerable excuse for shutting off politicians from the public that it has since become, though by then we had had nearly 20 years of the IRA blowing up London, a much greater material threat than the nebulous ‘Al Qaeda’ menace.

I am old enough to remember when we ‘plebs’ could walk along Downing Street just like any other street – I recall taking part in a demonstration *in the street itself* as Ted Heath was trying to form a coalition with Jeremy Thorpe in February 1974. You could have ridden your bicycle in and out, Chief Whip or not,  and nobody would have cared.  You could probably have left it leaning against the wall, honestly.  The deeply sad thing is that this recollection should now seem  so strange and hard to believe. Yet it was so.